Part of a Family (of churches)

EQUIP Study Conference 2019 in Waterloo, ON

“When they came to Jerusalem, they were welcomed by the church and the apostles and the elders, and they declared all that God had done with them.”

(Acts 15:4, ESV)

A key value of our Mennonite Brethren family of churches is what we call community hermeneutics. This means we study the Word of God / the Bible together; it is not left only to pastors, teachers, or elders to determine its meaning … we may lean on these people, but we come around the scriptures all together (much the way we do each Sunday morning; while the passage is presented in the sermon, we come together in the adult Sunday School class to further digest it).

I arrived in Waterloo, ON today to attend the biennial Study Conference that our Canadian Conference of Mennonite Brethren Churches hosts. This is where we together (as all MB churches across Canada) come together to wrestle through the scriptures. This year we are focusing on the handling of scripture itself so that we together, as individual churches and as a Conference, remain together in our understanding and methods of understanding the scriptures.

How are you actively engaging with the scriptures? Have you developed a pattern in which the scriptures are daily part of your reflections? How are we wrestling through the scriptures together with our families? In what ways could we better allow God’s Word to be an active part of our daily lives? Are we actively listening to the Holy Spirit as we take in the sermon God has brought us on Sundays? Are we part of a group of believers where we dig deep into how the Word applies to our everyday lives?

This is a strong and important value. It is a distinctive we want to place priority on.